“Innovation is the only insurance against irrelevance” – Gary Hamel
To an innovative person like me, the best part of being human is being confronted with difficult situations on a daily basis. The difficult situations we all face make us better as we learn to solve them. We have heard the saying, ‘smooth seas do not produce skillful sailors’. We navigate life everyday faced with several problems; some are easy, others are not. One such experience inspired me to start InsuredMine.
About eight months ago I was traveling and missed an insurance payment due date. I had no quick access to my payment details, the contacts of my agent, or my account details to be able to make that payment. Moreover, I had multiple due dates approaching about the same time. I also wanted to renegotiate my coverage and premiums; but since I was traveling, I had no way of doing all that. In this digital world, managing insurance should not be such a daunting task. So that idea snowballed, and InsuredMine was born out of my personal frustration.
Why Insurance?
Before we ask ‘why insurance’, we should ask ‘why not insurance’, considering the colossal size of the market and its deep financial impact. Globally, insurance premiums amount to more than $5 Trillion/year, and a number of total assets under management is north of $15 trillion. Trying to understand the scope and impact of those numbers is beyond my level of expertise. So, I will just stop by saying that the size is huge and the opportunities are endless.
Challenges of the Insurance Industry
The Modern Insurance industry is more than 400 hundred years old. It has evolved and adapted to market conditions and the scale and rate of adoption for processes are ever-changing. Moreover, approach and technology are impacting the entire industry. With growth also comes to some core challenges:
- Competing Pre-Internet companies – The average age of the 46 insurance companies in the Fortune 500 is 95-years-old. Most of these companies operate on multiple claims, underwriting, billings or support systems because of all the acquisitions that led to their inorganic growth. Secondly, Insurance companies are busy converting analog paper trails rather innovating process redesign. It is important to note that adopting technology and building a tool are two different things.
- Insurance is personalized, but services are not – Customer expectations have changed drastically for services. Players like Amazon, Apple, and FedEx have redefined that space by leveraging technology. But, the insurance industry still follows the traditional approach through a tag-team system (back and forth between insurer and producers). This approach needs to be redesigned as Insurance Providers are selling insurance and not the service of insurance, but the fact is that the contrary is true. It is the service and how they can effectively deliver that service that is the actual product of insurance.
- Selling what providers have instead of what customers need – Space for unconventional insurance products – from usage-based micro insurance to peer-to-peer and exotic products – is becoming commonplace. On top of that, there is a huge untapped market not only for the customers who do not own insurance but also for those who have it for limited items. It is difficult to estimate a customer specific latent risk profile under these circumstances. Even though empirical data is limited for these newer risks and insurance products, innovation and better risk management will put insurance companies in a better spot.
Current Solutions provided by Insurtech
Several Insurtech companies have challenged the conventional models of risk management and have leveraged technology to redesign the offerings in multiple directions. These include:
- On-demand insurance (micro insurance)
- Product awareness or marketplace (Omni channel distribution)
- Big data & IoT with telematics & connected devices
- Peer-to-Peer with social solutions
- Policy management and engagement innovation with AI
- Machine learning & Block chain
What does all this mean? It means traditional insurance companies are quickly losing ground to the startups as they continue to appeal to the new world customers. Hundreds of startups have ventured into this foray, and several of them have done remarkably well with innovative products, state-of-the-art technology, and most importantly by listening to the customers.
What problem am I solving with InsuredMine?
We have learned how several of the industry issues are being confronted and resolved. However, if I was to ask you a few questions like:
- How many of you have complete control over your insurance management?
- Do you have a clear understanding of your risk portfolio?
- Are you aware where you are over-covered and where you are exposed, and for how much?
- What does it take to optimize your insurance portfolio?
- What are the use cases for Insurance Management? And why do you need it?
I am confident that your answers will not be different than mine when I asked these questions to myself before I ventured out to start InsuredMine. We need to have a product that will place insurance customers in the driving seat. That is exactly what InsuredMine does in the Insurance Management space. It allows users to take control of their:
- Payments
- Claims
- Multiple providers
- Policy suggestions
- Customer service
- Insurance understanding
Considering that many companies now provide websites to do all of the above currently, you may ask, why do I need one more application to manage my insurance? Currently, each customer on an average has 4-7 providers with up to 12 monthly payments, two semi-annual renewals, and 1-2 claims per year. They all add up quickly, and you will be left thinking how can I effectively and efficiently manage them all in one place? But, this question is just scratching the surface of the underlying problem. The solution lies in understanding the value that kicks in when we add a layer of analytics on top to enhance insurance understanding and influence consumer behavior with contextual data for decision making. Is this for real? Yes, it is…and we are here to help insurance customers by building this one block at a time. The outcome of the product is threefold: greater efficiency, greater effectiveness, and higher customer satisfaction.
Our long term vision
At Insuredmine – we are passionate about creating a superior, seamless and a frictionless insurance management platform with our core focus on Digitization and Customer Satisfaction. We are proud to have come a long way from where we started, but at the same time, we also work with a greater understanding and responsibility that we have miles to go before we rest.
